HomeBullishBullish on The Muse…How to (Effectively) Be a Feminist in the Workplace

Bullish on The Muse…How to (Effectively) Be a Feminist in the Workplace

Bullish columns appear monthly on The Daily Muse. Additional articles from Jennifer are also appearing on DailyWorth, Medium, and here on GetBullish.

Let’s say you’re a feminist.

And you don’t exactly work in a feminist workplace.

Maybe you see some shit happening that shouldn’t be happening.

What do you do?

(Note: because non-intersectional feminism is no feminism at all, this article will talk about what individuals can do to combat sexism, racism, and all forms of discrimination.)

This post—the minutes from a Feminists at Work salon—contains some suggestions about calling out sexism, as well as about the self-care you may need to persevere in a hostile workplace.

But this post by C.V. Harquail on Authentic Organizations highlights some of the problems with explicitly talking about issues of concern to feminists:

Any time I bring this up as a woman’s issue, it gets marginalized and put in a corner because women are a “special case.”

Any time I bring this up as a women’s concern, people disregard it and tell me that this isn’t a business issue.

We don’t want that.

You can’t be effective as a feminist if people around you consider feminism to be some kind of quirky special interest you have, one basically irrelevant to business—as in, you’re into feminism and your co-worker is into bluegrass, and those two things are of equal importance.